Office applications Toolkit

Story: Microsoft slammed over XML patent

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To be fair to the patent office in this case this is a patentable invention in the US. They are just applying the rules.

And it is very difficult for them to search the prior art when nearly all of that lies outside the patent database. It may well be that no one had got round to specifying a mechansim for this particular data-structureXML conversion when the patent was applied for, so maybe there wasn't any exact prior art.

My understanding of the system is that prior art for some other similar data-strucutreXML conversion generally doesn't count. Which is particularly stupid in the software area because any such conversion is much the same in principle as all the other possible conversions and it's incredibly obvious to programmers that if you wanted to serialise a programming data-structure you'd do it just the same way as you did for serialising spreadsheet data-structures, because software is intrinsically generic. That a big part of the reason why the patent system fits it very badly.

So the only thing this patent could technically be failed on is obviousness. But in fact patents are very rarely refused on obviousness grounds because there no such thing as 'too small' an inventive step. Effectively if it really is even a tiny bit inventive that's good enough for the patent office. It seems to be an intrinsic problem with the system as people have been trying to raise the inventive step for decades with negligible success.

This is why you should never believe patent attorneys who say "there is nothing wrong with software patents per se - just the ones that are too trivial or broad - we can fix that". They are lying or mistaken - they can't fix it, and that's a good reason to keep software out of the patent system in Europe. Even if if you don't object to them on principle, you can just object to them in practice.

The patent system in the US is destined to become a laughing stock with another 10-15 years of this sort of thing. It'd be nice if some sanity could be injected before _too_ much damage is done. It'd be even better if we could laugh at them here in Europe because we managed to get some relatively sensible law. That won't happen unless people - especially SMEs, talk to their MPs and MEPs about this _right now_. The current directive will give us _exactly_ the same environment as the US, which sadly is what the leading representatives of the Conservatives (Malcolm Harbour) and the Lib Dems (Sharon Bowles) are fighting for.

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